Leaving fry for a week

[ljse]

I'm leaving friday and wont be able to take care of my fry. My mom says she will feed them, but she might occasionally forget. How long can fry survive without food? Should I freeze some brine shrimp for them?

 

[nightowl1350]

A bit more info will help.

What type of fry, how old are they, are they in with the parents, tank size and set up ie planted or bare bottomed.

Without normal w/c less feeding is better than over feeding of all your fish. They can live fine on one meal (even every other day) but if they are over fed and the tank fouls while you are gone it can kill them.


Hope the fry survive, but if not the pair is more important at this point as they can produce another spawn for you I would worry more about my breeders than a new spawn.

 

[Mike Wise]

I have had fry survive 2 weeks without feeding, but they were in a tank with a lot of Java Moss & algae, plus a sponge filter that they could feed off. I lost a few, but not many.

Here in Colorado we had an amazingly wonderful lady by the name of Ella Pittman. She was an incredible fish breeder - she successfully bred cardinal tetras in plastic shoe boxes on many occasions. She had a rule when it came to breeding, which the members of the Colorado Aquarium Society labeled "Ella's First Rule of Fish Breeding" - plan a vacation & your fish will breed!

 

[ljse]

I split the spawn up to see what the best fry growing method would be. The half I am worried about are in a 20 long with bare bottom. If they die I wont be that disappointed because there are still plenty in with the parents. The ones in the community tank seem to be growing twice as fast for some reason.

 

[Cathy G]

You never did mention the age/size/ type of fry...

When I left for a week, I followed some advice give me by tjudy--- freeze daily portions of bbs. Instruct your house sitter to plop one in once a day.

If you prepackage the amount of food, the chances are there will be no overfeeding. Um, I also did one other thing when I left - I added a bag of Purigen to my filter box. (It absorbs organics/inorganics, etc and kept nitrates down to 5-10 in the tank is was in... a tremendous help when you can't be there to do water changes!)

Cathy

 

[ljse]

Im not sure how old they are because one day I just noticed them swimming around and Im not sure how long they were there before i saw them. They are starting to become shaped like the parents.